A blog about individual and community development using new information and communication technologies, especially e-learning, open educational resources, open source, Web 2.0, blogs, wikis, social networking, social bookmarking, semantic web and other social software.

"Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively. Sure, Twitter is banal and trivial, full of self-promotion and outright spam. So is the Internet. The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it – on knowing how to look at it.

"When I started requiring digital journalism students to learn how to use Twitter, I didn’t have the list of journalistic uses for Twitter that I have compiled by now. So I logged onto the service and broadcast a request. “I have a classroom full of graduate students in journalism who don’t know who to follow. Does anybody have a suggestion?” Within ten minutes, we had a list of journalists to follow, including one who was boarding Air Force One at that moment, joining the White House press corps accompanying the President to Africa."

2013-08-30

SAMOSIR, NORTH SUMATRA (30 August 2013) - With governments, loggers, miners and palm oil producers poaching their lands with impunity, indigenous leaders from 17 countries gathered on a remote island in Sumatra this week to launch a global fight for their rights that will take advantage of powerful participatory mapping tools combined with indigenous knowledge to mark traditional boundaries.

2013-08-29

huffingtonpost.com - A day after LAUSD handed out iPads to kids at two of its campuses, the school board's Technology Committee started its own deep dive into the program that will put a tablet computer in the hands of every student by this time next year.Chaired by Monica Ratliff, who gave up her teaching career after she was elected to the board in May, the panel got an overview Wednesday of Los Angeles Unified's ambitious technology initiative.

2013-08-28

“By improving our education policies, we can become an education hub for the entire South Asian region.” In this recent statement given in Kathmandu, Minister of Education (MoE) Madhav Prasad Paudel cast his vision of Nepal’s future.

2013-08-27

Anybody who has been paying any small amount of attention to educational headlines in the past few years will be well rehearsed in the proposed benefits of MOOCs. A cursory online search will provide you with endless news articles, blog posts, TED talks and accompanying comments that cite the reasons why MOOCs, enabling global access to Ivy League-standard education, are the biggest thing to shake up education in the United States, if not the world. However, repetition does not establish truth, and unsubstantiated claims should be treated with suspicion.

2013-08-26

dmlhub.net - Antero Garcia is known throughout the digital media and learning community for leading the charge for the adoption of social media in the classroom and supporting participatory learning in school settings. So when it came time to decide on his dissertation project, Garcia knew three things had to be incorporated: his classroom, his students, and games. What resulted was Ask Anansi , an alternate reality game that features a fictitious storytelling spider who takes on a mentorship role with youth.

In the latest incarnation of the development world’s dominant paradigm, ICTs for Development, data is being embraced, analysed and monitored by companies, humanitarian organisations, aid donors and governments alike. Yet despite the promises of data evangelists that big and open data can revolutionise innovation, education, health care and infrastructure, the potential risks of data - exclusion, discrimination, identification, persecution, and violations of the right to privacy - bear serious consideration. Without critical analysis and legal oversight, data could become the new conflict resource, causing and sustaining human rights violations.

2013-08-25

Gartner's 2013 Hype Cycle Special Report provides strategists and planners with an assessment of the maturity, business benefit and future direction of more than 2,000 technologies, grouped into 98 areas. New Hype Cycles this year include content and social analytics, embedded software and systems, consumer market research, open banking, banking operations innovation, and information and communication technology (ICT) in Africa.

2013-08-23

Rwanda’s Minister of Youth and ICT, Jean Philbert Nsengimana, says ICT will contribute to making services available across Rwanda.

He was speaking during the ICT Literacy and Awareness Campaign in Rusizi District in Western Province on Thursday and Friday. The campaign has been organised by the Ministry of Youth and ICT (MYICT) in collaboration with other partners, to demonstrate online and SMS-based services to citizens.

2013-08-22

The Federal Republic of Nigeria has signed the African Virtual University (AVU) Charter to become the 18th Member State.

The number of AVU Member States has increased from 5 in 2010 to 18 in 2013. Other countries that have signed the AVU Charter include: Kenya, Senegal, Mauritania, Cote d'Ivoire, Mali, Tanzania, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Benin, Ghana, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Niger, South Sudan, Sudan, Guinea Bissau, The Gambia, and Nigeria. Countries become Member States of the AVU upon signing the Charter.

mashable.com - When the spirit of revolution swept across Egypt in 2011, an amateur photographer put aside his studies and headed to Tahrir Square, camera in hand. It was the beginning of big changes both for his career and his country.Mosa'ab Elshamy, now 23, bore witness to ongoing strife punctuated by the rise and fall of Egypt's first democratically elected president. Through photography (Elshamy currents uses a Canon EOS 60D), he documented this period in his country's history with stunning consistency and emotional depth.

The annual InSITE conference will be held in Wollongong, NSW Australia June 30 - July 4, 2014, with regular paper submission occurring now through the end of November. (Seehttp://InSITE.NU for details.)

InSITE is often quoted as the best conference delegates have ever attended. Its focus is to develop the trust relationships needed to enable collaborative research with colleagues from other nations and other disciplines. It is a unique experience in which the leadership in the organization truly welcomes new and old researchers alike. Unlike conferences that are designed for cliques of insiders, at InSITE you are the insider.

Awards and Opportunities Available for Quality Papers Received by Nov. 30

The Informing Science Institute is granting up to 17 awards for quality papers presented at the conference.

· Best Paper Awards – for Misinformation, Disinformation and Bias, Doctoral Studies, Informing Science Research, Discussion Case Study, IT Education, Education using IT (up to one award in each of the six categories)

· plus fast-tracking of these and other quality papers for publication in our journals.·

In addition, if you attended the 18th Int'l Education Technology Conference and Social Media 2013, you can claim your $100 Cash Travel Grant to attend InSITE.

When the XO-1 Laptop first came out in 2006, I was in awe of the hardware innovations. From bunny ears for better WiFi to a hardened swivel-screen top, to its low power consumption, OLPC had one innovation after another.

However, the operating system was still buggy, the software barely past beta, and the content non-existent. Add to it, OLPC wanted poor countries to spend millions (billions even) on the hardware, but not on better teachers, pedagogy, or even basic support.

So while the idea was brilliant, the hardware was clock stopping hot, OLPC had absolutely no clue about educational implementation.

All public secondary schools in Nepal are to have basic ICT infrastructure within the current financial year.

The Ministry of Education (MoE) has been allotted NPR 1 billion (USD 10.3 million) to provide all 8711 government-run secondary schools in the country with computers and internet access.

Balram Timilsina, Deputy Director of the Department of Education informed, “The office would release the required amount to particular District Education Offices and through them to the schools, who would be responsible to purchase five computers, one printer and arrange internet access”.

”We have some of the lowest computer literacy levels in the region, and even in the whole continent, and I’m pretty sure that this decision will redress that, though it might seem too little too late,” Aka added.